9,894 research outputs found
Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates
The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for
the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This
dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral
anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been
developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data.
To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image
analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral
vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from
automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature
registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of-
Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets.
To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation
and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal
cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain
because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels
containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The
neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel
expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled
partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit
surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in
neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed
landmark study.
To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm
for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted
cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form
deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using
data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local
changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus
WxBS: Wide Baseline Stereo Generalizations
We have presented a new problem -- the wide multiple baseline stereo (WxBS)
-- which considers matching of images that simultaneously differ in more than
one image acquisition factor such as viewpoint, illumination, sensor type or
where object appearance changes significantly, e.g. over time. A new dataset
with the ground truth for evaluation of matching algorithms has been introduced
and will be made public.
We have extensively tested a large set of popular and recent detectors and
descriptors and show than the combination of RootSIFT and HalfRootSIFT as
descriptors with MSER and Hessian-Affine detectors works best for many
different nuisance factors. We show that simple adaptive thresholding improves
Hessian-Affine, DoG, MSER (and possibly other) detectors and allows to use them
on infrared and low contrast images.
A novel matching algorithm for addressing the WxBS problem has been
introduced. We have shown experimentally that the WxBS-M matcher dominantes the
state-of-the-art methods both on both the new and existing datasets.Comment: Descriptor and detector evaluation expande
- …